Anxiety or Just Stress? 3 Ways to Tell The Difference
If you’ve been through anxiety you know how debilitating it can feel. To constantly feel on edge, anxious, and unsettled is exhausting. Always worrying about what “next bad thing” is going to happen or worrying that you won’t be prepared for what’s coming next would make anyone feel overwhelmed.
You can’t always know what’s around the corner, but you deserve to have the tools to feel prepared when they do.
Imagine what it could be like to feel free of all that worry. To feel like you could finally take a deep breath in and just relax. Not worrying about what’s coming next, but just being present and soaking up all the joy that moment has for you. Sounds nice, right? It’s possible to get there!
You deserve to feel the freedom to be present.
But how do we know it’s anxiety? What if it’s “just stress”? Let’s look at the differences!
-Stress is time-constrained/ Anxiety is longer-term
If we're talking about clinical anxiety, the DSM says that you “must experience anxiety for at least 6 months more days than not”. Stress is typically more temporary (even if it doesn’t feel that way), like adjusting to a new job or a new role in life (marriage, having a child, etc). Anxiety doesn’t usually have an “end point” because there’s always a new thing for the anxiety to latch onto. Stress usually lessens once the event is over–it has a beginning and an end.
-Stress is situational/ Anxiety is about many different topics
To be diagnosed with anxiety your anxiety has to be about a few different topics such as work, friends, traveling, etc. Stress can typically be pinpointed to certain situations like a big work project coming up, or a party that you don’t want to go to. Anxiety can latch onto many topics at once. Some examples are feeling like a failure at work, worrying that something horrible might happen to a family member, or that your friends are mad at you.
-Stress typically is the effect of something/ Anxiety can feel random
Stress and anxiety can come from your circumstances or drawing conclusions about those circumstances. For stress, this might look like: "I don’t like how my husband and I fight, so we need to go to couples therapy to get tools to reconnect". Anxiety can worry about the same thing, but it might look more like: "my husband and I fight sometimes—that means we’re about to get divorced". That’s why anxiety can feel slippery! Of course it makes sense that you want to have a healthy relationship and if your worry about that is all-consuming, it might be time for something to change.
Those are just some ways you can try to piece anxiety and stress apart, with the knowledge that it can also be both stress and anxiety! Whether or not it’s stress or anxiety, it can feel helpful to have someone to help you make sense of it all. If you decide you don’t want to walk through it alone anymore: feel free to give me a call! I’d love to walk alongside you. The important thing in all of this is to listen to yourself about how the stress/anxiety feels to you and what you need as you feel that.